 |
Loafers’
Club Front row, left to
right: David R. Solomon, Artemus Calloway, |
EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is a follow-up of a previous one about Mobile Register staffers who were part of the Southern Renaissance literary movement that began in the 1920s. During the Renaissance, Southern literature gained considerable energy from writers just starting their careers. Their works would become American classics. The period marked the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Zora Neale Hurston among others.
Many American writers sharpened their literary tools, and paid the bills, as newspaper reporters and editors while they developed careers in what is commonly called serious literature. Mobile Register reporters and editors were among them.
Between about 1910 and 1920, the Mobile Register’s staff included four men, Rice Gaither, Henry Herschel Brickell, Garrard Harris, and David Rankin Barbee who became prominent in American literature. A fifth staffer, Perkins J. Prewitt joined the Register and News Item in 1916 as a reporter and editor. Though Prewitt’s literary aspirations didn’t pan out, he and Harris later worked on the Birmingham News and were members of the literary group known as the Loafers’ Club.
In the years after World War I, many Alabama journalists found that time as a newspaper apprentice could improve their writing skills and enhance their careers and reputations. The journalists could draw on the characters they met on the beat for the characters they created in their fiction. Events they covered provided plot ideas.
The journalists also sought out others with similar writing passions. They came together in writers’ clubs or informal home gatherings to share their knowledge and skills, influencing each other’s writing.
There were several formal literary clubs in Mobile in the early 1900s. The Register listed the Newman Circle, the Shakespeare Club, the Century Book Club, the A.B.L.S. Society, and the Mobile Chapter of the Southern Association of College Women, “all of a more or less literary character.” They also were mostly for women and none of them appeared to be the type to attract journalists, men or women, looking to write a best-selling novel or short story.
Details on writers clubs for journalists in Mobile are hard to come. They didn’t seek a wide membership or create a formal organization. Often the members all worked together. Rarely did their gatherings merit mention in their own newspaper.
Rice Gaither and his wife Frances are an example of the informal way writers gathered together to improve their craft. Gaither joined the Mobile Register staff soon after graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1910. He became city editor by 1914, and then the managing editor.
For many years, the Gaithers used their Fairhope home as a writing retreat. They wrote from 9 o’clock in the morning until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. A sign on the front door said “No visitors until after 4 p.m.” But during the weekends and in the evenings, the Gaithers opened their home to many of the South’s leading writers and artists.
Those who visited with the Gaithers included artist and muralist John Roderick Dempster MacKenzie; popular journalist, novelist, and short story writer Roark Bradford; and successful businessman and author of numerous novels and short stories Williams March Campbell. No doubt, many local journalists who aspired to be novelists passed over the threshold of the Gaither home. Read more about the Gaithers in the post, Editors left their mark on American literature.
In 1920s Birmingham, meanwhile, a group of male writers and journalists formed a literary and writers society they called the Loafers’ Club. The club limited its members to 12.
The group met Wednesday nights, usually at the home of Octavus Roy Cohen, perhaps their most famous member. They discussed plots for their stories and offered advice for improvement. If a publishing house rejected a member’s story, the group helped revise the work until it was accepted for publication. They succeeded in getting national book and magazine companies to publish their works.
Below are sketches of some Loafers’ Club members who also spent time as journalists in Alabama:
Octavus Roy Cohen produced more than 60 novels, 250 short stories, five plays, and 30 film scripts. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1891, Cohen graduated in 1911 from Clemson College with a degree in engineering. Over the next three years, Cohen changed jobs and careers with amazing rapidity. After short stints working the coal and iron industry in Birmingham and writing for the Birmingham Ledger, Cohen returned to Charleston, became a lawyer and set up his own law practice in 1913. He also started writing short stories and returned to Birmingham the following year to marry Inez Lopez, also a writer. After Cohen moved to Los Angeles in 1935 to write movie scripts, the Loafers’ Club faded away.
Perkins
J. Prewitt
is the subject of the earlier post Changing jobs for
$3 more a week.
Though he spent only about a year at the Mobile Register, that was time
enough to get to know fellow literary aspirants Gaither, Brickell, Harris and
Barbee. Prewitt graduated from Mississippi State College and started as a
reporter on the Birmingham Ledger. After stints at other newspapers,
including the Register, Prewitt returned to Birmingham to become city
editor on the News from 1919 to 1925. He left journalism until 1945 starting
Tab, a tabloid paper for teenagers. In 1952, he became the telegraph
news editor and a Sunday columnist with the Montgomery Advertiser.
Prewitt wrote several novels and short stories, but none were published. 
Edgar Valentine Smith (left)
and Perkins J. Prewitt
Henry Vance began his journalism career when he was around 20 writing for the Mountain Eagle in Jasper, Alabama. In 1913, he began writing for the Birmingham News working as a sportswriter, columnist, and humorist. He wrote a column called “The Coal Bin” and appeared regularly on the “Henry and Percy” radio show. Vance contributed stories to the monthly Smith’s Magazine, created for the “John Smith’s” of the world and with a circulation of 125,000.
Garrard Harris is treated more fully in the earlier post, Editors left their mark on American literature. The point here is to note his association with the Mobile Register between 1911 and 1914, when he was the associate editor, and later with the Loafers’ Club in Birmingham. In spring 1920, Birmingham News publisher Victor H. Hanson hired Harris as associate editor, a job he held until his death in 1927. He joined the club while at the News.
Petterson Marzoni, after serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy during World War I, moved to Birmingham with his wife. Marzoni’s father-in-law, Frank Potts Glass, was one of owners of the Montgomery Advertiser and Birmingham News. Marzoni became the drama editor with the News. Marzoni supposedly wrote the first weekly film criticism column in a U.S. newspaper, the Birmingham Age-Herald, acquired by the News in 1927. Marzoni wrote one story for Weird Tales, a fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine regarded by historians of fantasy and science fiction as a legend in the field. He also wrote stories for Black Mask Magazine, Metropolitan Magazine, and Good Housekeeping. MGM turned his story, “Big Hearted Jim,” into a movie called “Brotherly Love.” Marzoni served as editor of slave narratives and other narratives.
Edgar Valentine Smith was Birmingham News copy editor, short story writer, and a playwright. His short story “Prelude” won the O. Henry Prize in 1923. He won the prize twice more during his long career with the News.
Abram Artemus Calloway worked as reporter and editor in Birmingham for the Ledger, Age-Herald, and News. He wrote about 400 stories, novelettes, and serials which appeared in Hollands, Country Gentleman, Argosy All Story, Cowboy Story, Chicago Tribune, and other magazines and newspapers. His more than 3,000 bedtime stories appeared in the Birmingham News. Calloway and several of his fellow Birmingham journalists wrote for Weird Tales, a fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine regarded by historians of fantasy and science fiction as a legend in the field. During the1920s and 1930s, Calloway helped nurture young short-story writers by buying and publishing their stories in the News.
James Saxon Childers, though a member of the Loafers’ Club, didn’t become a journalist until the 1930s, working as a part-time reporter, columnist, and book reviewer for the Birmingham News. After serving in World War I as an aviator and intelligence officer, he became a faculty member of the English department at Birmingham-Southern College. He wrote novels and biographies, but travel books were his most successful works.
Jack Bethea became a reporter for the Birmingham Age-Herald in 1909 while a junior at Phillips High School. He became city editor at the Birmingham Ledger in 1916 and managing editor of the Birmingham Post in 1921. Bethea wrote five novels about the New South, coal mining and cotton farming. Collier’s Weekly serialized one in 1923. Two were adapted for the movies.
Sources
Craig
Allen, Jr., “Octavus Roy Cohen at Center of Loafers’ Club,” The Jefferson
Journal, (Jefferson County Historical Association, No. 3, Summer 2012), 5-6.
Online: http://www.jeffcohistory.com/images/NEWSLETTER_3rd_Qtr_2012.pdf.
Accessed August 3, 2020.
A. J. Wright, “Octavus Roy Cohen,” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Online: http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-3716. Accessed August 3, 2020.
Letter to Ralph Poore from Penelope Prewitt Cunningham, Birmingham, Alabama
- Letters of Perkins John Prewitt, in the possession of his daughter Penelope Prewitt Cunningham, Birmingham, Alabama:
- Telegram, D. R. Barbee, Mobile Register to Perkins J. Prewitt, May 24, 1916
- Perkins J. Prewitt to Ruth Prewitt, May 31, 1916; Perkins J. to Ruth Prewitt, June 1, 1916
- Perkins J. to Ruth Prewitt, June 4, 1916
- Perkins J. Prewitt, an undated letter to a business friend later in life
Henry Clay Vance, “Alabama Authors,” Alabama Library Association. Online: http://www.lib.ua.edu/Alabama_Authors/?p=2062. Accessed August 1, 2020.
“Artemus Calloway,” Tellers of Weird Tales. Online: https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2011/07/artemus-calloway-1883-1948.html. Accessed August 3, 2020.
“Pettersen Marzoni,” Tellers of Weird Tales. Online: https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2011/06/pettersen-marzoni-1886-1939.html. Accessed August 3, 2020.
Abram Artemus Calloway, Alabama Authors,” Alabama Library Association. Online: http://www.lib.ua.edu/Alabama_Authors/?p=906. Accessed August 1, 2020.
Samuel J. Mitchell, “James Saxon Childers,” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Online: http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2344. Accessed August 1, 2020.
Joe
Ross, “Jack Bethea,” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Online: http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2336.
Accessed August 1, 2020.
